Week 4 Update
Kate
This week I delved into getting the JSON data from the server. Our app now updates a list view from with the data. I learned a lot about how AsyncTask works. At first I was struggling with how to return something from my class that extended AsynTask to the MainActivity, but after reading enough stack overflow posts, I finally realized that whatever is returned in doInBackground actually goes to onPostExecute. Once I figured this out, printing the data to the screen was easy. I then started researching how to create a list view that can be dynamically updating from JSON data pulled from an API. I found a very good tutorial (that also helped me with the previous step, pulling the JSON data) here: https://www.learn2crack.com/2013/11/listview-from-json-example.html
The next steps will be making the UI look like our wireframes, implementing the HTTP Post protocol so users can add their own free food events from the add page, and parsing from the Facebook API into the server.
Zach
The server is officially up and running via Heroku. Now that we have figured out how to make asynchronous requests from the app, we are able to get data from the server. We are still working on posting data to the server from our app.
I started working with the Facebook Graph API this week. I registered my Facebook account as a developer account and created an app called JumboEats. Facebook has a tool called Graph API Explorer that allows developers to try out different requests and see what data they return. This has been really helpful in learning how to use the API. I’m having some trouble figuring out how to access all of the groups that a user (i.e., me) is a member of. The YouTube videos “Getting Started with the Graph API” from the Facebook Developers account (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WteK95AppF4) and ”RESTful Web API Design with Node.js: Facebook Graph API | packtpub.com" from Packt Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F9cLrI_thg) have been really helpful. They breakdown the API’s overall structure and give examples of how to use it.
This week I want to figure out how to access the free food groups on Facebook and pull every post into our database. If I have time I will also look into methods for parsing each post to extract usable information.